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Side Step Festival

SIDE STEP FESTIVAL 2018

Platform for new voices

Curating the Side Step programme has been throughout the years an attempt to find fresh, ground-breaking and timely contents for audiences of dance and performing arts. The festival’s goal has remained to import internationally remarkable stimuli into the Cable factory, to shake what we are accustomed to. This year the strong works of the featured artists deal with societal and cultural power relations.

The programme’s performances function as vigorous antitheses of the assumed and the obvious, that we are in the process of developing past. The artists are the core of this progress and the future. The artistic programme illustrates and shakes art’s conventional forms and the hierarchies of performing arts both on stage and on a global scale.

These pieces have been selected as part of Side Step principally because they are significant images of the times and strong autonomous stage works that have claimed their space. The pieces share a powerful relation to music, the politics of sound and a consciousness of the space where the performances happen. They formulate courageous and necessary relations to power structures and the canon that is present on the Western stage. This year’s works not only place themselves boldly in a relation to traditions but also create new, even noisy openings into current time.

We hope that the 2018 festival’s full programme will provide experiences of identification and empowerment and will simultaneously spark the curiosity and excitement to understand the world in yet another way. Our dream has been a programme that showcase dance and the form of performance with works, that present a utopian coming into the core of power structures and then beyond them. The festival is intended as a platform for different artists’ thinking and expertise, and that platform serves as a place for important discussions.

Side Step is a place for challenges, progress and dreams. This way the festival represents its anarchistic nature and its attempt to offer approaches to dance art from brisk and experimental perspectives. The festival is a liberated space, to which newness flows and where further new currents come into being.

The 2018 festival’s artists are Ligia Lewis, Pan Daijing, Marcela Levi & Lucía Russo and Sonya Lindfors. In addition to the performance works the festival arranges a publication party and a dreaming session, a discussion, workshops, artist talks and the festival lounge at the annual pop up bar Ihana. The lounge serves as the festival’s meeting point where we invite all festival-goers to share experiences and continue their night. You are warmly welcome to Side Step!